Convention Diaries: Wednesday

by The Young Sentinel

Pride

In the morning I went to a breakfast hosted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It was a high point of the visit. A hundred and twenty or so people were milling about, shaking hands and chatting with congressmen. The feeling of isolation I felt from being seemingly the only person at the convention who does not know everybody else at the convention was enhanced greatly by this event. One of the challenges of the past few days has been matching my knowledge of the Senators and Congressmen to their faces.

This morning, for instance, I saw House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the hallway (I believe he is staying on my floor), accompanied by his entourage of Secret Service agents. The face looked vaguely familiar, but, to paraphrase one of my favorite books, the words “majority leader” wandered through my mind in search of something to connect with. By the time I made the connection he was gone.

The DCCC (known as the “D-Triple C”) event took place in a large conference room. People wended their way around the tables holding plates of food from the buffet at the back. I remember reading once in a public speaking manual that a speaker that wishes to be taken seriously should never, ever, try to compete with food. Food will win. Always. Those who were preparing to speak smartly waited until most had finished with their breakfast, which created a few more minutes of nothing time. I idly chatted with the Pennsylvanian couple at my table. It was with great amazement, then, that I watched through the corner of my eye as the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, walk up to our table. She seemed to know everyone there (save me, of course) and she shook my hand. Unprepared for this moment, I did my shtick: I’m a 14-year-old blogger from New York City…I admire your work, etc. Surprisingly, she was not dismissive in the way that so many of the Senators had been. After she walked on to greet someone else, the conversation continued. My mind, though, was elsewhere. And somewhere in my head, fireworks were going off.

The event went well. The chairman of the DCCC is a congressman named Chris Van Hollen. His job is to maximize the Democratic gain in the House of Representatives. His slideshow presented the fundraising efforts, recruitment successes, and likely pickups. To culminate, he invited up to the stage eight challengers to Republican seats that he was highlighting. One of these challengers was a woman named Christine Jennings, who had run (and lost by a matter of a few hundred votes) for Katherine Harris’ house seat in Florida-13 in 2006. Jennings’ opponent, Vern Buchanan, had made millions in the auto industry and poured vast quantities of money into his campaign. Despite election irregularities that clearly favored Buchanan, a state court decided several weeks after the convention that Buchanan should go to congress. To me and others in the progressive community, it had been an eerie reminder of the challenges that lay ahead, a sour aftertaste to a sweet victory.

After the event, I introduced myself. She was by far the friendliest of any politician I have yet met. She insisted that I give her the name of my blog and that I pose for a picture with her. “You have no idea how much it means to a house candidate from Florida,” she said, “knowing that somewhere in New York City there is a 14-year-old following your race.”

Pelosi spoke as well, but it was a brief and uneventful talk. Then came Hoyer, who opened up with something that made me dread his speech. “Did any of you watch the Olympics? Any of you watch Michael Phelps?” There was a murmur of assent. “Well, you watched him for twenty minutes. In that twenty minutes he had his moment of fame; he took home those eight gold medals. But what you didn’t see was the six hours a day he spent in the pool, day after day, year after year, building up the strength and endurance and lung capacity to compete.” I sighed again. He quickly finished his analogy by encouraging everyone to “spend those hours in the pool, building the organization to win in November”. I wasn’t impressed; I don’t think anyone was. But then he changed course fast, “And I know we’re all proud of these women athletes, who brought home more medals than the men. And we can be proud of the Democratic Party, because we pushed through Title 9 and mandatory physical education for girls.” Now he was on to something. Slapping the podium, he continued, advocating the need for more female members of congress, a guarantee of equal pay for equal work, and tougher punishments against domestic violence. When Hoyer finished, the audience was on its feet. His message was compelling, no question about it.

One of my favorite congressmen, Democratic Whip James Clyburn, walked to the stage. Clyburn has been in politics for a million years, ever since leading in the Civil Rights Movement. Passionately, he spoke about the need for a more solid majority and a Democratic President in the White House. Although he performed well later that night at the convention, the cameras didn’t do him justice. Up close, he is almost superhuman. He talked about the history, how every time it was the Democrats that oversaw the advances in women’s rights and workers’ rights and civil rights. “We can be proud of this party,” he declared. Going on, he spoke about Truman, how he had sacrificed much of his political capital to desegregate the military, and how because of that even his own mother wouldn’t talk to him. He spoke about Johnson, how he had quipped as he signed the Voting Rights Act that he was relegating the Democratic Party to minority status in the South for a generation. And I don’t think there was a single person in that room who wasn’t moved, who didn’t feel just a little bit prouder to be an American.

The Convention Itself

I took one of the first buses to the Pepsi center to watch the convention itself. I had realized that my credentials qualified me to sit in the second tier as opposed to the third, and I wanted to claim a seat. Even though I arrived early, the seats in the middle that looked the speaker straight in the face were already taken. I had to consent to a seat between three and four o’clock: I could see the speaker in profile and about two thirds of the screens behind him and to his right. The opening hour was rather dull. Pelosi and Dean gave brief technical speeches formalizing the nomination process, and the role call began.

Even for me, it became, well, boring after a while. With each state, the process went something like this:

The lady at the podium who was taking the official tab would call on the state and say, “You have so-and-so votes. How do you cast them?” The delegation leader would then reply, “On behalf of the great state of Alabama, home of the Representatives Artur Davis, etc., the something-or-other state, birthplace of so-and-so, proud of being the only state to so-and-so, and with eyes firmly set on the future of this country, proudly casts [hands microphone to someone else, who continues] so-and-so votes for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and [passing microphone again] so-and-so votes for the Senator from Illinois, the future President of the United States of America, Barack Obama!” [Scattered applause.] The lady at the podium, whose interest and inflection of speech did not decrease as the hours wore on, would say “let the record show that the great state of Alabama has cast so-and-so votes for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and so-and-so votes for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.” [Scattered applause.] “Alaska, you have so-and-so votes. How do you cast them?”

This continued at great length. Occasionally the accents would be incomprehensible and the ever-so-patient Ms. Podium would ask for the number to be repeated. Of course, the thing was choreographed such that New York put Obama over the top. New Mexico yielded to New York when Hillary Clinton (who had walked just a few feet from me earlier that day coming out of a CNN interview) cast the final votes that made Obama officially the nominee. I walked out into the hall in the middle to stretch. In the hall I came across Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, whom I had met when my class visited Washington in May. I introduced myself and he remembered me, citing a talk he had given for our class back in May. I had been most enthusiastic question-asker and I had thanked him on behalf of the class, but regardless it significantly raised my perception of the average Senator’s IQ. If only I could remember every nobody I met for ten seconds back in May.

What followed were more than twenty speeches. The only speeches worth remembering were those of Clinton, Kerry, and Biden.

Clinton’s was full of zingers, and he received several standing ovations during the course of his speech. He proclaimed that Obama was ready to lead and mesmerized the crowd.

Kerry’s speech was possibly the best of his career. He used his personal friendship with John McCain to point out the inconsistencies between Senator McCain and Candidate McCain. Candidate McCain, pointed out Kerry, has criticized more than one bill that he himself wrote. “Talk about being for it before you’re against it.” The crowd went nuts. “I think,” continued Kerry, “that before John McCain ever debates Barack Obama, he should finish the debate with himself.” Bravo.

Biden was presented in an exceedingly clever way. A few days ago most people’s impression of Biden (including my own) was that he was a superficial and narcissistic blowhard who talked too much to disguise the fact that he had nothing meaningful to say. Although this is still the picture of him that many would like us to believe, I think I speak for almost every Democrat that on the whole the more I learn about Biden, the more I like him.

I didn’t know, for instance, that he had grown up poor in Scranton, Pennsylvania and had worked himself through law school. I didn’t know that his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident the month he was about to be sworn in as one of the youngest senators ever. I didn’t know that, because his sons were badly injured, he originally refused to take the oath of office, saying “Delaware can get another Senator, but my sons can’t get another father.” I didn’t know that for years he took the train back to Delaware each night, two hours each way, to be with his family. Although some of the material was a little old (I had, after all, watched every speech since the convention began), I was astounded by the humanity that seemed to emanate from him and the close bonds he seemed to have with his family.

One of my strongest beliefs about politics is that you can tell a lot about a candidate by how he gets along with his kids. McCain’s daughter (from his first marriage) doesn’t like him. Rudy Giuliani’s kids hate him and are for Obama. Some people respond that they don’t care how a candidate is in person, they just want an effective commander-in-chief. I say this: your kids are the only people in this world who can be expected to love you unconditionally. If your own offspring don’t trust you, then why should the rest of the country? Are you for some reason better at managing a nation than you are your own children?

I see Barack Obama and Joe Biden and I see humanity, an authenticity not common in relationships of Washington politicians. I see change, and I believe it.